[Novalug] OT: Service industry and funding Free & Open Software

Clif Flynt clif@cflynt.com
Tue May 11 12:24:52 EDT 2010


On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 11:38:37AM -0400, Bonnie Dalzell wrote:
> ...
> The cost to me is more or less the same. When I was sharing the income the 
> worker was supposedly motivated to promote the business as the more 
> clients, the more income. However the actual attitude of the worker 
> towards promoting the business seems to be independent of the method of 
> calculating the income.
>

  I'd bet it reflects the changing value of a dollar.
  
  When I was in college, I worked nights at a fastfood restaurant -
generally 8:00 PM until closing.

  Closing time was officially 11:30.  If it was a slow night, we could
close at 10:30, and if it was busy we stayed open until the rush died
down (could have been 2 or 3 AM if there was a Grateful Dead concert.)

  Working a few hours a day meant I had money for food.  Working past
midnight meant I was half-asleep in class.

  Thus, the dollars I earned in the first 3 hours were more valuable
to me than the dollars I earned in the hours after 11:00.

  It was pretty common for student managers to take the 10:00 hourly
reading at  10:15 and the 11:00 reading at 10:45, making sure that
the last hour was slow enough for a normal close time.

  As Bryan pointed out, a good citizen should pay for what they get,
either with money or time.

  I vote my hours in a similar way to how I treated the work in
FastFood.  The first few are easy, but the more hours I spend on a
project, the more they cost me.  

  I try to put the hours where they'll make the most difference. Thus,
I'm more likely to put time into identifying exactly how to reproduce a
bug in Denemo than I am in the gcc compiler.  I'm one of a few hundred
Denemo users, vs one of several thousand gcc users.

  Clif

-- 
... Clif Flynt ... http://www.cwflynt.com ... clif@cflynt.com ...
.. Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide (2nd edition) - Morgan Kauffman ..
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